Environmentalists From The United States

"In New Orleans east, we have one supermarket. I went to the supermarket yesterday. I could get no lettuce, you know, no fruit…all the fruit gone. It was just amazing. 70,000 people, one supermarket in New Orleans east. That’s it. And I have to tell you, I’ve not been a big McDonald’s fan, but after Katrina, if it weren’t for McDonald’s we wouldn’t have had anything to eat. It was like people just forgot about us."

"After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered."

"academics continue to play a crucial supporting role through such institutions as the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta University, founded and run by Robert Bullard, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans, run by Beverly Hendrix Wright. These centers, and others like them, provide crucial research that aids local struggles, as well as train a new generation of professionals of color."

"Any climate bill has to deal with both repairing EJ communities and reducing climate change. The fact of the matter is that they go hand in hand, because one of the reasons that we are the way we are is because of what we’ve done to communities of color across this country — putting fossil fuel industry facilities in our communities, not caring about our health or our lives, that’s why we’re here. We can’t move forward without addressing that."

"Environmental injustice occurs in a number of ways. The fact that, first of all, when you look at the federal level they never addressed soil contamination that exists all over the city. We have extremely high arsenic levels, and PCBs, cause where we live we use a lot of pesticides; we have a lot of pests. From rat poisoning, to pesticides for roaches and mosquitoes, you already have all of that, right, and then you add to that the big mixture that came in all the water from all over, even from the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, then you add to that human feces and everything from the sewage treatment plants. That water was extremely filthy. And very dangerous. And then it settled. There was a light dust that covered everything when we came back home."

"Racism holds everybody back. So, while people make the decision that people who work in hotels and restaurants really don’t need a livable wage because they’re black, and we don’t have to pay black people a lot, what they are doing is they are robbing themselves of a decent tax base. They are producing citizens who can’t buy health insurance, putting a drain on the city. And so the racism that drives this belief that you can treat some human beings less than others, in the end catches up with all of us because it lowers the standard of living for everybody. And I think that’s what we have been dealing with in the city of New Orleans."

"My mother used to say a man’s money goes where his heart is, so if that’s the case, the amount of money going to CEQ to support environmental justice [EJ] does not show where their heart is. I believe the heart is there, but the money has to follow."

"Any project that moves forward should be inclusive of three things: It will not harm communities. It will not contribute to the climate crisis. And it will not perpetuate racially disproportionate burdens of pollution. Any program that we bring in to solve the problem must have these three principles embedded in it so we don’t make the same mistakes."

"On liquefied natural gas, the majority of the places where they want to put liquefied gas facilities are in poor and minority communities. So the same group of people is now being asked to bear the burden of our transition [from fossil fuels]. What kind of transition is that for communities?"

"Biden’s approach is unique in that it not only acknowledges the damage that is now and has been done by pollution and the resulting changes in the climate, but his approach attempts to attack the sources of the problem. That includes racism. And Justice40, [a federal initiative to deliver 40 percent of the benefits from federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities] is an attempt to ameliorate the existing problem and stamp out or change policies and regulations and laws that perpetuate the continuation of disproportionate pollution burdens for Blacks and other minorities."

"I don’t think we should talk about reducing greenhouse gases and saving the planet without environmental justice being shoulder to shoulder with that."

"history of human slavery spawned environmental racism in the United States."

"Communities have not been able to recover, to go back home. And gentrification is happening at warp speed in areas where climate change and flooding have caused the displacement of communities. This is a huge problem. Race is at the center of it in terms of fairness. And we have to find a way to make certain that we make up for the harm that’s been done and put things in place so that harm does not continue for racial minorities in this country."

"it seems difficult to talk about putting in place a project that deals with racial discrimination when you can’t use race in evaluating it. It’s really insane."

"We’re dealing with multiple impacts… wet periods, dry periods, sea level rise, increased temperatues. That’s why there’s such a sense of urgency behind adaptation and mitigation, because the window for us to make decisions on how we’re going to prevent the worst is closing, and if we don’t take action now, then we’re going to be dealing with, in the words of the IPCC, “horrible” consequences."

"Migration is a huge issue, not just for the Americas, but also for other parts of the world. When we talk about the many impacts of climate change, what they mean, I think a major end result are climate refugees."

"Whether you like it or not, we’re going to have to deal with climate change, and we’re going to have to adapt. A lot of people say, just do what they do in the Netherlands, or New Orleans, build seawalls, but we can’t. We sit on a very porous limestone rock, so when the sea level goes up, it doesn’t just come up over the coast on the beaches, it comes in underground into the acquifer, and we get our drinking water from that acquifer. It raises the water table causing inland flooding and it also contaminates that potable water. Communities are spending millions of dollars moving well fields inland because of salt water intrusion."

"The list of places that have the largest and/or the fastest growing Latino populations are also the places that are most vulnerable to sea level rise. And practically speaking there’s a large portion of the Latino population that works outdoors in the environment whether it's agriculture or construction, and so we are more sensitive to environmental changes."

"I also think that because we have more international perspective we’re not as susceptible to the campaign of disinformation that’s being pushed by the polluting companies. These arguments seem to be most upfront in American media. But when you look at international media, whether Telemundo or BBC, they’re presenting the information in a more practical way. They’re talking to scientists, they’re talking to experts, and when you do that, there is not a debate."

"being the only Latina in most of my science classes and certainly not having any Latinos, let alone Latinas to look up to in terms of mentors, kind of put it upon me to do better, to represent my community. So that's tough. So you kind of have to do both. You have to represent your community at the same time. You want to hold your own as a scientist and not feel like you're going to only be doing research that affects your community."

"The research for a long time had showed how Latinos and in general communities of color are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of pollution. But at the time we weren't talking about how those same communities are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change."

"There are some impacts that are already baked into the system that we can't avoid and we need to learn to adapt and adapt in a way that's equitable. But we also need to do everything we can to prevent the worst."

"If we avoid the worst and we're able to adapt in a way where we really kind of changed our approach to things like equity and how we deal with the environment. If we do that, and I want my son to know I was a part of it, even just a small part of it, but part of it, and if we don't and we fail, I want him to know that I tried."

"So ocean acidification for folks that work in, for example, fishing industries, storms for anybody that lives along the coast, sea level rise for folks that live along the coast as well and heat, which is pretty much everybody. So I think to think that anyone is immune to the impacts of climate change is delusional."

"How can we look at our kids and say we're fighting climate change and we're driving SUVs and eating steak every night and soaking up energy. It's hypocritical. We need to kind of walk the walk."

"Reduce the amount of meat that you eat. Think about transportation, how you can reduce the amount of flying that you do. How can you not drive as much as you do? If you're going to buy a house, think about energy efficiency and think about what you really need in terms of house. Do you need a 5,000 square foot house or 15,000 or 1500 be okay?"

"The sea level rise that we’re going to see in the next 15 years is going to transform Florida, it’s going to transform many parts of the world, it’s going to create major problems with flooding and drinking water. We’ve got a lot of science, we know that climate change is happening, we know that it’s human-caused, and we know that we’re starting to see the impacts now. But this information is not being sufficiently reflected in our policies at the state or the federal level."

"all GND policy, whether narrow or broad, serves a triple bottom line: achieve the decarbonization goals set out by H.R. 109, reduce income inequality, and redress systemic oppression."

"GND policy works to shape markets and create demand so that low-carbon and no-carbon goods become the default, rather than the alternative to carbon-intensive goods."

"The details will keep changing as we learn how best to decarbonize equitably and mobilize the American people-our hands, our creativity, our resources-to remake our economy, while caring for one another every step of the way. But no matter what we encounter in the weeds of policy blueprints and implementation, the vision of the Green New Deal provides the compass we'll need."

"the climate crisis can continue unabated only with immense concentrations of economic and political power."

"The success of the Green New Deal depends on the ability to reroute power away from the 1 percent and the political and economic institutions designed to serve them. If we are going to become an economy that serves people and the planet, then the people-all of the people-need power, and we need it now."

"Given the time frame, the climate crisis-vast, existential, worsening by the day-is solvable only through an economy-wide energy transition, which requires an economic mobilization. Only a national coordinated all-out push can ramp up production of clean energy infrastructure fast enough-and ramp down emissions fast enough."

"The GND's vision of power is one of redistribution: from private to public, from employer to worker, from the historically advantaged to the historically disadvantaged."

"Every economic mobilization in American history has exploited marginalized people. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)-created during the New Deal to provide loans to homeowners facing foreclosure-often labeled predominantly black neighborhoods as "high risk," which discouraged lending and encouraged redlining. Today, 74 percent of the neighborhoods labeled "high risk" are low- to middle-income neighborhoods, and 64 percent are predominantly minority-meaning that these areas are still racially and economically segregated to this day."

"Highway expansion and urban renewal programs during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s displaced hundreds of thousands of residents-mostly people of color-without adequate financial assistance, erasing decades of wealth for those who owned homes and businesses. Because of this, the thought of an economic mobilization understandably frightens millions of Americans. The Green New Deal must directly address these fears, or risk losing the public support it needs to sustain itself across a decade."

"Critics who doubt our nation's capacity to achieve a transition of the scale and speed the Green New Deal proposes should heed the lessons of the World War II mobilization: set the production targets you need to win, even if they seem impossible at the outset, and then hustle to meet those targets through massive, coordinated, strategic public investment and collaborations with private industry."

"Fossil fuel impunity requires intense concentrations of economic and political power among corporations and the wealthy who profit from them."

"The GND resolution proposes to achieve these goals in two ways. The first is through a set of "projects" that, if completed, would nearly eliminate carbon emissions in the US. The second is through a set of policies that aim to protect Americans from the disruption and instability that transitioning away from fossil fuels will create and reduce inequity."

"The Green New Deal is a new policy vision-one that will guide government and society through the biggest task in modern history: decarbonizing our global economy within the next ten to twenty years."

"The ability to burn fossil fuels with no limit and no legal repercussions requires two things. First, fossil fuel industries and those who control them (or profit deeply from them) can concentrate enough wealth and political power to override the will of the people-who, by and large, want to stop climate change. Second, there are people and places that can be hurt, even killed, with little consequence."

"I have spent my life trying to rewrite systems of power, and policy is nothing if not a system for creating and distributing power. That is why, contrary to popular belief, the most important part of a policy proposal is not the details at least not at the beginning. It's the vision that the policy presents and the story it tells. The best policy proposals-that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them-present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it."

"When I asked my mom and grandma why Englewood looked like this, they told me about the government. About how the highway system had been built through Black neighborhoods, destroying communities that would never be rebuilt. About the city's housing authority razing public housing and scattering families in the name of "urban development," only for city officials to turn around and sell the prime real estate to developers on the cheap. About the city systematically underfunding Black schools and then shutting them down because of "underperformance." And that's just what happened to my neighborhood-not even what happened to my family."

"The United States is a nation of scarcity, and increasingly so. Seventy-eight percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. As of 2018, about 40 percent of Americans could not afford an unexpected $400 expense without going into debt or having to sell off their possessions. About 25 percent of Americans skipped necessary medical care because they couldn't afford it. For most people in this country, we are not a nation of prosperity."

"The Green New Deal is designed, first and foremost, to address the climate crisis at the speed, scale, and scope required to prevent catastrophic levels of warming."

"Only the federal government wields the power to lead a national mobilization that can decarbonize the economy fast enough."

"I got the term “Intersectional” from Intersectional Feminism*, which is a type of feminism that I identify with. I feel like intersectional feminism shouldn’t have to exist, nor intersectional environmentalism, but because some people in both circles don’t factor in how race and culture can play a significant role in how people are treated or interact with the environment, it needs to be there. For example, people of colour are more likely to live next to toxic waste sites or in areas with higher levels of water and air pollution. I’ve spent the past 6 years in Environmental circles and have been frustrated at times by the lack of acknowledgement of its importance, so I felt like I needed to give words to the type of environmentalism that I practice and would hope all environmentalists adopt."

"I studied Environmental Science and would much rather focus on urgently addressing the climate crisis, but I cannot when I’m fearful for my life and that of those who look like me. I would much rather dedicate my life to fighting against extractive industries than fight for my right to exist in this world. I wish that was just understood as an inherent principle in society."

"For someone who is just getting started, they can start with educating themselves and reading literature about environmental justice and allyship."

"Oprah 100%, I’ve always looked up to her and adore her so much."